The Widow and Her Faith

Before the Passio Anastasiae sends its heroine into the open service of the martyrs, it sets her in an unhappy marriage to the pagan nobleman Publius, who confines her, despises her faith, and covets her fortune — until his death on an embassy at sea frees her wealth and her movements for the ministry that crowns her in martyrdom. This file sets out that legendary marriage and widowhood, the figure of Publius, and the recognizable predicament of the secret Christian wife in a pagan household, throughout reporting all of it as the developed legend and pinning it to its source.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; Deliverer from Potions)

The Marriage in the Legend

The Passio Anastasiae — the connected Greek and Latin legend (BHG 76–81; Latin Passio sanctae Anastasiae) that supplies the whole of Anastasia’s biography — frames her ministry to the martyrs with a domestic ordeal: an unhappy marriage to a pagan husband from which only his death releases her. The husband is named Publius (in the Latin recensions Publius, sometimes with the dignity Publius Patricius, “Publius the patrician”), a Roman of high rank to whom Anastasia, herself of noble Christian formation, has been given in marriage (Passio Anastasiae, BHG 76–81; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). The marriage is the legend’s engine of pathos: it places a secret Christian woman inside a hostile pagan household and makes her faith the cause of her suffering, so that the prison-ministry which follows is born out of, and over against, her own domestic captivity.

As with every element of the connected biography, this must be received as legend and not as history. The Passio is a developed hagiographical romance, and the discipline of this collection is to separate its connected narrative from the securely attested but biographically empty cult of a martyr Anastasia at Sirmium and at Rome (see The Historical Core). Per the repository’s methodology, the marriage, the husband, and the widowhood are reported here as what the legend attests, pinned to their source, and never certified as documented fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Publius and the marriage are not a recoverable chapter of Anastasia’s life; they are the opening movement of a literary composition.

Publius: Hostility, Confinement, and the Fortune

In the legend, Publius is the pagan antagonist of Anastasia’s secret faith. Discovering — or coming to resent — her Christianity, he treats her with contempt and cruelty: he confines her within the house, restricts her movements and her access to her own people, and seeks to lay hold of her wealth, the inheritance and dowry that her noble birth had brought into the marriage. The Passio dwells on this domestic persecution as a kind of private martyrdom preceding the public one: Anastasia, shut up and ill-used, is shown disguising herself in poor clothing to slip out and continue her secret visits to the imprisoned confessors, and writing in her distress to her teacher Chrysogonus, whose letters of consolation sustain her through the ordeal (the correspondence is treated in The Minister to Prisoners) (Passio Anastasiae, BHG 76–81; Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936). Publius’s hostility thus serves two narrative ends at once: it dramatizes the cost of confessing Christ within a pagan family, and it threatens the very fortune that, once freed, will fund Anastasia’s open ministry to the martyrs.

The detail of Publius’s designs on her fortune is more than incidental color. The legend is careful to make Anastasia’s wealth the instrument of her sanctity — the means by which she feeds, ransoms, and consoles the imprisoned confessors and buries the martyred dead — and so the husband who would seize that wealth is, in the logic of the Passio, an enemy not merely of Anastasia but of her charity (Passio Anastasiae, BHG 76–81; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). His confinement of her and his covetousness are the obstacles the narrative must remove before the servant of the martyrs can take up her work in the open; and the device by which the legend removes them is his death.

The Death at Sea and the Widowhood

Publius is taken out of the story, in the common form of the legend, by a death abroad: sent on an embassy — the Passio names a mission to Persia (or, in some tellings, simply a sea voyage on imperial business) — he is lost at sea and perishes, and Anastasia is left a widow (Passio Anastasiae, BHG 76–81; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). The widowhood is the hinge of the whole Passio. By it, Anastasia comes into the free disposal of her own fortune and the freedom of her own movements: no longer confined, no longer answerable to a hostile husband, no longer in danger of having her wealth seized, she is at last able to do openly and on a large scale what she had done in secret and at risk — to seek out the imprisoned confessors, to relieve them with her money, and to follow the persecuted Church out of Rome and across Illyricum (the wandering is treated in Following the Martyrs).

The structural function is unmistakable, and it is part of how the Passio shows itself a crafted literary composition. Publius exists, in the economy of the legend, to be an obstacle and then to be removed: his hostility supplies the heroine’s early suffering and the proof of her constancy, and his death supplies the release that makes the central ministry possible. The widow freed by a husband’s death to dispose of her wealth in works of mercy is, moreover, a recognizable hagiographical and social type, and the legend uses it to motivate the transition from the secret service of the confined wife to the open service of the free widow (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). What in a documentary life would be biography is here, frankly, narrative mechanism — the means by which the legend moves its heroine from the household to the prisons and the road.

[Disputed: Publius and the details of the marriage. Publius (Latin Publius, sometimes Publius Patricius) is supplied by the Passio Anastasiae (BHG 76–81) alone, with no independent attestation; the Bibliotheca Sanctorum (vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”) treats the husband, the confinement, the designs on Anastasia’s fortune, and the death at sea as elements of the developed legend, not of history. The particulars vary by recension and language: the husband’s name, rank, and the manner and occasion of his death (an embassy to Persia, an unspecified sea voyage on imperial service) differ between the Greek and Latin forms of the Passio and among the Latin manuscripts. Delehaye (Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936) reads the marriage-and-widowhood frame as a literary construction of the Passio, of a piece with the conflation by which the connected legend was assembled from several originally independent cults; the marriage is therefore reported here as the legend’s, not as a fact behind it.]

The Secret Christian Wife in a Pagan House

If the marriage to Publius is legend, the predicament it dramatizes was a real one, and the legend’s power rests partly on its truth to a situation the early Church genuinely knew. The Christian wife of a pagan husband — keeping the faith in secret, exposed to her husband’s hostility, her property and her freedom at his disposal, her charity to the persecuted Church carried on at personal risk — is a figure the sources of the persecution-era Church recognize, and the pastoral problem of the mixed household drew the attention of Christian writers from the earliest centuries (on the world of the persecution, see Rome and the Great Persecution and The Pre-Schism Church; on the place of women in the early Church, Women in Orthodoxy). The legend of Anastasia gives narrative form to that predicament: it makes the hidden faithfulness of the Christian wife, and the use of a noblewoman’s wealth for the relief of the persecuted, into a story of constancy rewarded with freedom and crowned with martyrdom (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”; Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936).

This is the right way to hold the marriage to Publius: not as the recovered biography of a particular Roman couple, which it is not, but as the Church’s contemplation of a real and costly situation — the secret Christian in the hostile household — attached, as the whole connected legend is attached, to the name of a securely venerated martyr. The historian cannot confirm that Anastasia of Sirmium endured such a marriage; but the historian can confirm that Christian women of the persecution endured exactly this, and that the early Church remembered their hidden constancy with honor. The legend is, in this measured sense, faithful to the Church’s memory of a type even where it cannot be confirmed as the life of an individual (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936; and the method set out in Reading the Anastasia Tradition).

The Freed Widow and the Service of the Martyrs

The widowhood, in the Passio, is not an end but a beginning. Released from Publius, possessed of her own fortune, and free to travel, Anastasia turns the secret charity of the confined wife into the open ministry of the free widow: she seeks out the imprisoned and the condemned, spends her wealth in their relief, and follows the persecuted Church across Illyricum, until her own confession brings her to arrest and to the fire (treated in Following the Martyrs and The Death by Fire). The arc the legend draws is continuous and deliberate: the suffering wife becomes the free widow, the free widow becomes the servant of the martyrs, and the servant of the martyrs becomes a martyr herself. Publius’s death is the pivot on which that arc turns — the moment at which the private ordeal opens into the public ministry (Passio Anastasiae, BHG 76–81; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”).

Through all of it the discipline holds. The cult of a martyr Anastasia is ancient and secure, attested at Sirmium and at Rome before the legend took shape; the marriage to Publius, the confinement, the designs on her fortune, and the death at sea are the developed Passio, a literary frame for a connected biography assembled out of several once-separate cults, reported here as the legend and pinned to its source, not as recovered history (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1; and see The Passio and the Conflation). The widow and her faith are the legend’s, and they are worth knowing as the legend — the Church’s loved and long-transmitted way of contemplating a martyr it has venerated for sixteen centuries.

References

Passio Anastasiae (Latin Passio sanctae Anastasiae) and the Greek Passio of Anastasia (BHG 76–81). Cited as the source of the connected legend — the marriage to Publius, the confinement, and the widowhood.
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Étude sur le légendier romain: Les saints de novembre et de décembre. Subsidia Hagiographica 23. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1936. (The marriage-and-widowhood frame as a literary construction of the Passio.)
Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia.” Rome: Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1961. (Publius and the marriage as elements of the developed legend; the variation among recensions.)
Martyrologium Hieronymianum. Ed. G. B. de Rossi and L. Duchesne, Acta Sanctorum, Novembris II.1. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1894. (The secure Sirmium cult behind the legendary biography.)
METHODOLOGY.md, this repository.